A growing number of consumers now have high-speed, or broadband, connections to the Internet in their homes. The increased bandwidth provided by these broadband connections allows the delivery of digital television and/or video services to home consumers. One such technology uses one or more protocols in the Internet Protocol (IP) family as a delivery mechanism. This technology is referred to as IP television, or IPTV.
The IP family of protocols uses a layered approach, with IP itself acting as the network-layer protocol. Sitting on top of the IP network layer is a transport layer such as TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) or User Data Protocol (UDP). The IP family also includes a variety of session-layer protocols above the transport-layer, such as Real-Time Transport Protocol (RTP) and Session Description Protocol (SDP). IPTV delivers video or television as a Motion Pictures Experts Group (MPEG) transport stream, carried by UDP/IP, or RTP/UDP/IP. Thus, a number of MPEG transport stream (TS) packets are encapsulated into each UDP or RTP packet.
By using the IP family of protocols to deliver an MPEG transport stream to a set-top, service providers can take advantage of the existing IP network infrastructure, which is substantial. However, the protocol layers that allow successfull delivery of packets across the Internet can be a problem when processing the packet in the set-top. In a set-top using a conventional design, merely moving the constant stream of high-speed video packets up the layered protocol stack can consume a significant amount of processor time. This leaves little processor time for other tasks, such as transmitting packets or responding to user input. As a result, the user can experience a slow response time to set-top applications, for example, as when scrolling through an on-screen program guide. Thus, a need arises for these and other problems to be addressed.